For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the dance between cynicism and hope in contemporary perceptions of optimism.
You can tell something about a culture’s attitudes towards optimism by the literary characters it elevates: you have the “best-of-all-possible-worlds” sophisticated naivete of Professor Pangloss and his protege in Voltaire’s Candide; the irrepressible bootstrap-pulling of a Horatio Alger protagonist; the searching-for-a-silver-lining that was the defining characteristic of the cheerful orphan girl Pollyanna. Meanwhile, modern bookshelves sag under any number of “manifest your desire” self-help scenarios, and the occasional searing critique like Terry Eagleton’s Hope Without Optimism, whose opening chapter derides optimism as necessarily irrational, “a primordial stance toward the world…which lights up the facts from its own peculiar angle and is thus resistant to being refuted by them.”
But are those our only real options regarding optimism? Blind acceptance or ruthless rejection? Matthew Wilson and Tyler VanderWeele of Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program recently argued in the journal Philosophia that deploying a more nuanced taxonomy of optimism can better equip philosophers and psychologists to understand which forms of optimism can be rational or irrational — and which are something else entirely.